Seven Dirty Words (24 page)

The exposition on dying (“It’s one of the few fair things in life. Everybody catches it once”) featured an observation that would become almost as much a staple of the comedy club explosion of the 1980s as the two-drink minimum: the prevalence of dying metaphors in comedy. Comics die. They bomb. An unreceptive room is like a morgue. On the other hand, when their jokes hit the mark, they kill. “Laugh? I thought I’d die.”

Despite having done versions of this bit, with segments on funerals, suicide, and the afterlife, on the road for a year or more, Carlin was unprepared for the crisis he faced on St. Patrick’s Day in 1978. Driving his daughter to school, he was bothered by an ache in his jaw and the feeling that the pain reliever he’d taken had gotten stuck in his throat. When the pain didn’t subside, he drove to his doctor’s office, where blood tests confirmed he was suffering a heart attack.

Besides the obvious abuses of his drug habits, Carlin hadn’t exactly been diligent about his diet. “He’d come home after a gig and cook up half a pound of stove-top macaroni with a brick of butter,” says one friend. “That was his midnight snack.” Even after disciplining himself in the kitchen, the comedian lived with the prospect of further heart trouble for another thirty years. His father’s first symptom of heart disease, as he sometimes pointed out, had been “a trip to the cemetery.”

Within a few months of the first heart incident Carlin was back onstage in Phoenix, reworking much of the material from
On the Road
for his second HBO special. Taped in the round at the Celebrity Star Theater, the performance took place a few weeks after the Supreme Court decision. When it aired,
George Carlin Again!
opened with a scrapbook-style slide show of the comic as a schoolboy and teenager, posing with various neighborhood friends and his dog, Spotty.

The ninety-minute taping was transferred to film for a proposed feature he had been working on for some time, to be called
The Illustrated George Carlin
. The story would follow his life from birth to death, using a variety of media. “There’ll be a lot of concert footage with some cartooning and little vignettes,” he explained. “As far as I know, no comedian has made a film with his own concert footage.”

He opened the phone book and found a listing for an animator, Bob Kurtz. “I don’t think anybody had ever found us through the Yellow Pages before,” says Kurtz, laughing. Carlin and Brenda went over to see the artist, who listened to the comic’s ideas for the film, then got up and drew a few frames off the top of his head. “Two minutes [after Carlin and Brenda left], I got a call,” Kurtz recalls. It was Carlin, telling the animator he had the job. In the pre-cell phone era, Kurtz was dumbstruck by how quickly it happened. Where are you? he asked. “I’m across the street in a phone booth,” Carlin responded.

The Illustrated George Carlin
preoccupied Carlin for months. “In his very soul, it was the story of George,” says Jim Wiggins, a comic friend of Carlin’s who worked with him as a writer on the project. “Of course, there were so many layers, it was not really autobiographical.” It was, however, “really silly.”

Wiggins was the owner of a heating and air conditioning company in the Chicago area when he decided to sell the business and give comedy a try in the early 1970s. Like Carlin, he was a chronic stoner; also like Carlin, he could do a mean radio announcer’s voice. Inspired by
FM & AM
, he started writing letters to Carlin. To his surprise, the comedian wrote back. When Wiggins took his first phone call from his pen pal, it was a request: Carlin would be flying in to play the Mill Run Theater in Niles. Could Wiggins come by with a bag of grass? Wiggins caught every show that weekend, and a friendship was born.

For a few years Wiggins operated a Monday night comedy show in the back room of a gay restaurant known as Le Pub, in Chicago’s Old Town neighborhood. Tim & Tom, the biracial act of Tim Reid and Tom Dreesen, were fellow regulars. One winter night Wiggins and his wife, Joan, who was pregnant with their fourth son, drove up to Milwaukee in an unheated Pontiac to bring Carlin another stash. Sitting on the edge of the stage together long after the show had ended, Joan spontaneously asked Carlin to be the baby’s godfather.

Shortly thereafter Wiggins packed up his family and moved to Hollywood, where they put $8,000 down on a big old dilapidated house with an extension that had housed a doctor’s examining rooms. Wiggins converted the place, a few blocks northwest of Hollywood and Vine, into a rooming house for aspiring comics trying to break in at Mitzi Shore’s Comedy Store and Budd Friedman’s Improv. Several months into the project, strapped for cash, Wiggins asked Carlin for a $1,500 loan to buy drywall. He’d repay it when he got his check for writing gags for Chuck Barris on
The Gong Show
, he said. Carlin sent a messenger with three grand and told Wiggins not to bother paying him back. Set the money aside, he said, as an emergency fund for the comedians staying in the rooming house. “Then tell them they don’t owe it to you. Tell them to pass it on to somebody else.”

Working to establish his own comedy career, Wiggins (who now calls himself “The Last Hippie”) had the nagging suspicion that people would think he was deliberately emulating Carlin. “We could do wordplay like ping pong,” he says. “We had the same kind of laugh, the same kind of attitude. It was always in the back of my mind.” Working on a screenplay for
The Illustrated George Carlin
, they began spending afternoons in an old office Carlin kept in a Santa Monica building right out of a film noir: “Like an old detective’s building, down a corridor with glass-paneled doors,” Wiggins recalls. There they spent countless hours writing gags for the proposed movie. One day Carlin told Wiggins that their shared sensibility was likely to stand in the way of Wiggins ever becoming a well-known act. The death of Lenny Bruce had left a void for him to step into, he said. “You’re not that lucky. I’m not gonna die.” When Carlin was hospitalized, Wiggins sent him a telegram:

Dear George,
Try again.

As Wiggins remembers it, Carlin finally abandoned the film project after a lengthy series of negotiations with the Canadian Film Board. He called his writing partner into the office to deliver the bad news. He couldn’t get an agreement on the level of control he wanted. “Wigs,” he said, “remember—if you ain’t got control, you ain’t got shit.”

At the end of 1978 Little David put out what would prove to be its last Carlin album, a compilation intended to capitalize on the notoriety of the Pacifica case. Smartly titled
Indecent Exposure
, it was a best-of collection specifically focused on the comic’s taboo topics and forbidden language, with routines including “Sex in Commercials,” “Bodily Functions,” and “Teenage Masturbation,” bookended, of course, by “Seven Words” and “Filthy Words.” The cover pictured Carlin in another pose connecting his comedy to crime—wearing a pair of running shoes and a flasher’s overcoat. As much as the dirty words had made him a household name, he was ready to move on. “Frankly, I feel dated, because I’ve continued to do that material for so long that I feel a bit of a prisoner,” he said.

For Carlin, the next couple of years were wilderness years, a time for regrouping. “It was like a breathing-in period,” he reflected. “Everything can’t be constantly on an upswing. Nature shows you there’s inhale and exhale. . . . Other people would call it ‘His career was going in the shithouse.’”

Gradually weaning himself off his cocaine habit, he was emotionally drained. His continued use strained his relationship with Brenda, who was working hard to stay sober. Their relationship was not always a happy one. Carlin admitted on occasion to physical altercations with his wife during his drug years. Even so, their love for each other was apparent. “They had this wonderful rapport,” says Bob Kurtz, who watched the couple hug like honeymooners during the recording sessions he conducted for Carlin’s voiceover.

Carlin also learned that he had major problems with the IRS. He had seriously neglected his taxes, which he blamed on bad advice and his own cocaine habit. “By the time 1980 arrived,” he recalled, “I believe I was about two million dollars upside down with the IRS, and it got to be another million before the saga was finished.” He had a new manager, a regional promoter named Jerry Hamza, a native of Rochester, New York, who had booked some of Carlin’s shows before agreeing to handle the comic’s career. Before handling Carlin, Hamza had specialized in country music, organizing appearances by iconic artists such as Johnny Cash, George Jones, Merle Haggard, and Loretta Lynn. With Hamza’s help, the comedian began the long, grueling task of paying off his enormous debt.

His personal problems were affecting his ability to see where his career was headed. He knew it, but he was philosophical about it. “My album career had faded, and I didn’t have a personal vision of myself anymore,” he said. “I’d gone through my autobiographical stage. Then I started to get into what they call ‘observational’ comedy—these things that have no importance at all, but they’re universal. . . . It was a casting about, a wallowing in the backwater of this career success I’d had.”

He agreed to a guest appearance on
Welcome Back, Kotter
, the ABC sitcom starring the former Village comic Gabe Kaplan as a high school teacher returning to his old Brooklyn neighborhood. Carlin played Wally “The Wow” Wechsel, a popular disc jockey who was once one of the Sweathogs, the remedial students who were the stars of the show. Somewhat more intriguing was the gig he took narrating
Americathon
, a weirdly prescient futuristic scenario written by the Firesign Theatre’s Phil Proctor and Peter Bergman, who had established their loony brand of sketch comedy on Pacifica’s KPFK. With an ensemble cast including John Ritter, Fred Willard, a young Jay Leno, and the new wave rock ’n’ roller Elvis Costello, the movie imagined the United States two decades down the road, in the year 1998. Having run out of oil and on the verge of bankruptcy, the government sponsors a telethon. Not only did this now out-of-print film predict a rash of eventualities (such as China’s compromise with capitalism) that seemed ludicrous at the end of the 1970s, it also neatly predicted the gleeful doomsday prophesies of the latter years of Carlin’s own career.

He continued to make a handful of
Tonight Show
appearances each year, working out his new material on the national stage. (Carlin would claim to have done the show 105 times by the time Carson retired in 1992,) He and Muhammad Ali were two of the guests on an episode guest-hosted by Diana Ross; he appeared with Richard Pryor not long after Pryor’s infamous freebasing accident. During one guest-hosting spot in early 1981, he sat at a desk during the monologue and trotted out the latest version of his old standby, the mock newscast. One item involved the “Gay Liberation Front, who along with the Tall People’s Association have announced they will oppose the Army Corps of Engineers next week when it attempts to destroy a fifty-foot dike.” With Debbie Reynolds once again a guest, as she had been on his first guest-hosting night in 1972, Carlin rounded out the episode by discussing sexual fantasies and men’s beards with Dr. Joyce Brothers.

At the end of the 1970s, comedy in America was on the verge of its own kind of gold rush, with thousands of prospectors and a fortunate few who would cash in. The folk clubs of the sixties, with their regular showcase opportunities for comedians, were almost a thing of the past. The momentary heat of the disco scene was also fading fast. The vast disillusionments of the 1970s—war, political corruption, garbage strikes, hostage situations—left a gaping opportunity for comic relief, and nightclubs devoted to comedy soon began popping up in cities across the country. In LA, the Improv and the Comedy Store faced fresh competition with the opening of the Laugh Factory in 1979. Two years later Caroline Hirsch opened the original Caroline’s in New York, where the Improv, Catch a Rising Star, and Comic Strip were already fixtures. Boston, another fertile breeding ground that would produce Leno, Steven Wright, and Paula Poundstone, among many others, had the Ding Ho, Nick’s Comedy Stop, and the Comedy Connection.

In San Francisco’s financial district, the entrepreneur behind a rock venue called the Old Waldorf converted the room’s former backstage area into an English pub for the lunch crowd, then asked a local promoter to turn the space into a comedy club at night. That place became the Punch Line. With Cobb’s Comedy Club just up Columbus in Fisherman’s Wharf and a hovel called the Holy City Zoo out in the Richmond district, San Francisco soon renewed its reputation as a comedy mecca. Homegrown talent such as Robin Williams, Dana Carvey, and Bobby Slayton crossed paths nightly with carpetbaggers like Poundstone and Ellen DeGeneres.

The rise of
Saturday Night Live
was often credited as one reason for the resurgence of interest in comedy. Another was HBO, which was reminding home viewers of the pleasure of seeing a comic craftsman work in long form, as opposed to the six-minute allotments of talk show appearances. “If you were in Birmingham, Alabama, and said ‘stand-up comedy,’ people would think Bob Hope,” said one veteran standup. “It took cable to expose America to comedy as an art form.”

Carlin, of course, was well beyond the nightclub stage by this time. Having established that the rock ’n’ roll crowd would pay to see a comedy star in a concert setting, he had helped clear the path for major concert draws such as Cheech and Chong, Steve Martin, and Eddie Murphy. Ironically, the new emphasis on club comics had the effect of pushing Carlin off into his own realm.

He was a hero to many of the new generation of comics, who loved the twisted recesses of his mind and his insistence on concise language. “There are so many comedians that wanted to be a comedian because of him,” says Steven Wright. “What a brain he had.” But Carlin was also considerably older than the new breed, turning forty-four in 1981. He’d been too young for Lenny’s generation and too old for
SNL
, and now he was too successful to join the fraternity of the clubs. He had become an island—a creature of show business who would just as soon have nothing to do with show business. His record sales had dropped off, his movie had fallen through, and he didn’t know where the HBO affiliation would lead. It would be some time before he realized that his unique voice had only begun to develop.